Heroin addiction was daily battle for York woman

Blaine Cunningham discovered his granddaughter Desiree Bange on her bedroom floor shortly before she died of a heroin-related overdose in 2015.
Chris Dunn, York Daily Record

Desiree Bange, left, with her grandfather, Blaine Cunningham. Desiree was living with her grandparents when she died from a heroin-related overdose. Blaine Cunningham found her passed out in her bedroom, and did CPR to try to revive her, but she could not be saved.(Photo: Submitted)

She was headstrong and smart, and her family was in her corner, but Desiree Bange couldn’t shake the hold of heroin.

“She said, ‘You don’t know how I gotta fight with this every day of my life,” said Karen Cunningham, Bange’s grandmother. “You wake up every morning, and the first thing you think about is how can you do this.”

Bange was one of 127 people who died from a heroin-related overdose in York County in 2014 and 2015. The York Daily Record compiled and analyzed information about each of those 127 people in an attempt to better understand who is dying from heroin-related overdoses and look for possible solutions to what many call an epidemic in York County.

Bange was 28 when she died, the median age of women who died from a heroin-related overdose death. She was white, as were the majority of both men and women who died. Though she lived in York, most of the people who died lived outside of the city.

Bange also represents an often-told story about heroin addiction: how difficult it is to overcome, even for a person who's been clean for a while.

"Recovery is a lifelong thing," said Erin Cosgrove-Findley, program manager of The SAFER Initiative, a substance use program through Family First Health.

Bange had been clean for more than five months when she overdosed and died.

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When Bange was an infant, her mother, Alita Lewis, went to rehab for an addiction to crack. Bange went to live with her grandparents then. Blaine Cunningham, her grandfather, said she was his “baby,” and that’s what he called her even as she grew into an adult.

He was the one who found her, lifeless and turning blue, when she overdosed in her bedroom at their house on Sept. 3, 2015. He performed CPR until the police and emergency responders arrived.

He said he doesn't really know how Bange's heroin addiction started.

Bange didn't think she had a problem when she first started using heroin, Lewis said. She said she thinks Bange’s heroin addiction stemmed from an addiction to alcohol that evolved.

“The drinking led to the pills, and the pills -- it’s cheaper to go buy heroin than it is to buy pills,” Lewis said.

The first time Bange used heroin was a couple years before she died, Lewis said. She was very close to her daughter, she said, and her daughter was open with her about what she did. Bange told her that a friend introduced her to it, and initially she snorted it.

“I guess she snorted so much of it that it wasn’t working no more, so she started doing the needle,”” Lewis said.

Bange lost her job, and court records show she had some legal trouble, including an arrest for retail theft. Her family said she was trying to get money for drugs. Bange’s life started to revolve around heroin, her family said.

But she did try to get clean many times.

Often, Bange was court-ordered to get treatment, her mother and grandparents said.

Karen Cunningham went into all of the several recovery houses where she was ordered to stay, and she and Blaine Cunningham paid for a lot of Bange’s time in the houses.

Some of the recovery houses were expensive, and some were pretty shabby, even dirty, Karen Cunningham said. Karen and Blaine Cunningham said they believe that a lot of the recovery houses are “out to make money,” and they should be regulated and have professional staff on site to help people in recovery.

Some people, including some in law enforcement and in the York County Court of Common Pleas, have said recovery homes are part of the recovery process, but wonder if state regulation would help their accountability.

Addiction “really needs to be treated as a disease, and (addicts) need to be around professionals, not other addicts,” Karen Cunningham said.

Even when Bange was recovering, she didn’t want to change her circle of friends, said Karen Cunningham, whom Bange called Mammaw.

“She said to me, ‘Mammaw, it’s not my friends (who were a bad influence). I have my own mind,’” Karen Cunningham said. She said they talked often about how someone battling addiction needs to change so much in their life to overcome the addiction, and how difficult it is to love someone with an addiction. "It’s a nightmare sometimes,” Karen Cunningham said.

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A photo of Desiree Bange from high school sits in her old bedroom in Blaine and Karen Cunningham's York home.(Photo: Chris Dunn, York Daily Record)

Lewis said even after her daughter overdosed, and she overdosed several times, she still didn’t stop using. “She would get pissed off because she ruined her high, but that’s an addict, that wasn’t Desiree, that was not my daughter,” Lewis said.

Heroin affects the pleasure center of the brain in a more powerful way than other stimuli, Cosgrove-Findley said. Heroin becomes "more important than food, than sex, than water, because those things aren't getting as much pleasure."

About nine months before Bange died, she overdosed and was found by police in an alley in York, Lewis said. Bange ended up in the hospital, where she had substantial short term memory loss, her family said.

Bange went back into treatment, and she was clean for five months.

Her family isn’t quite sure what happened that led to her using again.

They think she got some heroin after her final counseling meeting.

Karen Cunningham dropped her off for her final meeting, and picked her up when it was over. Back at the house, when Bange went to get ready for work, she didn’t come out of her room when she normally did.

“We were gonna leave about 10 of nine,” Blaine Cunningham said. “It got to be about 10 of nine, and I went in and called her and said are you ready to go, and there was no answer.”

He went to her room, opened the door, and she was lying slumped over on the side of her bed.

Blaine Cunningham took instruction from a 911 dispatcher over the phone on how to do CPR, and continued until the police arrived. He said he thought his granddaughter had some kind of medical incident. He didn’t think she would use heroin in his home. He thought she had been clean for long enough, and maybe she would finally kick her addiction.

Karen Cunningham said she screamed when she saw the needle in the room. Her voice trailed off as she recounted that night.

“There was nothing you guys could have done,” Lewis said, filling the silence. She said she thinks her daughter, having been clean for five months at the time, thought she could take as much heroin as she had before, and it was too much for her.

Cosgrove-Findley said she is familiar with research that says people in recovery are more likely to overdose. "From what I understand, oftentimes when individuals are clean for a long time, and they go back to it, they're going back to the same amount," Cosgrove Findley said. "That's oftentimes when the overdose occurs."

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A 2006 photo of Desiree Bange and cousin Hannah Cunningham is displayed in Blaine and Karen Cunningham's York home. "She had a heart that just didn't stop," Karen Cunningham said of how caring her granddaughter was.(Photo: Chris Dunn, York Daily Record)

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Karen Cunningham said she has so many happy memories of her granddaughter -- the first of her grandchildren born and the first one to die.

But her death is so painful for the whole family.

“She had a heart that just didn’t stop,” Karen Cunningham said of how caring Bange was. And she was funny and fun to be around.

“It happened in her room, and not on a doorstep downtown,” Karen Cunningham said. “That’s the only consolation I can get out of this.”

The family said they have talked with the Not One More York Chapter, and want to volunteer to help other families and to ultimately prevent heroin use.

Bange would have wanted her family to help others because she wanted to help others, even if she couldn’t save herself, they said.

"If we can help anyone out there just by telling her story, that she wasn't really a bad person, she did ugly things, and she knows it, it caught her," Blaine Cunningham said. "Down in her heart, she'd have did anything for anybody, so she was a good person, and she's truly missed."

He still questions how long Bange was lying unconscious in her room, and what would have happened if he had gone to check on her sooner the night she died. Then he comes back to a thought he's had so many times before.

An urn containing Desiree Bange's ashes sits on a dresser in her old bedroom in Blaine and Karen Cunningham's York home. "If we can help anyone out there just by telling her story, that she wasn't really a bad person, she did ugly things, and she knows it, it caught her," Blaine Cunningham said.(Photo: Chris Dunn, York Daily Record)